I am currently using Wheelock's Latin as my only textbook. I have other materials - 38 Latin Stories and the Oxford Latin Desk Dictionary. I have progressed to the third declension and the indicative perfect so far. I am considering abandoning Wheelock altogether and dive straight away into Lingua Latina. Should I do so? I am starting to feel rather bored of Wheelock because it goes so slowly and the vocabulary comes too much at once without meaningful contextualisation (the Senentiae Antiquae). And texts seem ruthlessly adulterated as well (Sententiae Antiquae again)! Lingua Latina seems so good with its engaging stories, and many words in the first few chapters of LL are at the late second half of Wheelock. So should I change for LL and abandon Wheelock, or finish Wheelock and then continue with LL? Thanks!

For myself, LL was a delightful puzzle until chapter 3 or so and then it was difficult to make sense of things. That's when I turned to a grammar to help out. LL is very clear on what concepts it's teaching in each chapter, but it's well worth having a separate point of view on how the language works.

I really appreciated this when I returned to LL after having abandoned it because I get the gist of a passage but was not at all confident about the nuances. After a couple of adult learning classes in Latin, I came back to it and it was delightful again.

For me, LL gives me enough of a puzzle to keep the process interesting so it keeps motivation up. The result is that it's been the one thing I come back to. But I doubt I would ever have had the patience to learn the language with it as my only resource.

The makers of Lingua Latina also make LINGVA LATINA : A College Companion. It has grammar and notes keyed to each chapter. There are also Latin workbooks that are helpful made by the same company. With these materials you could bypass Wheelock altogether if you so chose.

In the past intead of Wheelock I have used the old D'Ooge book that is posted on this site for free. I actually bought an antiquarian copy for about $25. It has less fluff than Wheelock and is small. You could put it in your back pocket and go to the beach.

I once had two of these old D'Ooge books, but I gave one to a cute Canadienne in my ancient Greek class in New York City.

I have used both resources for just over 3 years. It helps to read other materials just to give you mind a break and to learn new vocabulary. You need LL for the practical aspects of Latin and Wheelocks to learn grammar.

Osterdeich wrote:Wheelock is horrible. I use pages from it to clean up the mess my cats make when they eat too much tuna. Plus it's for bourgeois capitalist pigs.

You sum up my feelings all too well. I own a 2nd edition copy that I keep for sentimental reasons. I suspect it is one of those books that only shines when the author uses it as a text. Except Wheelock is dead.

Wheelock himself was unsympathetic to the left-wing politics of most of his colleagues at Brooklyn College (who seem to have liked him all the same, if you can believe what you read) and some of his example sentences were sexist. Wheelock, however, didn't intend his textbook for bourgeois capitalist pigs but for mature students entering U.S. Universities after the Second World War who hadn't done Latin at high-school. A large numbers of GIs were then entering under the 1946 GI Veteran Bill. The book was to serve courses to enable such students to catch up in their first year at Uni. It was also designed to serve the needs of the growing number of correspondence courses and for self learners. If anything, it was meant to be a democratically accessible textbook, even though some example sentences might have made you cringe, if you were a woman or left-wing. At the time (1956), it was indeed a more accessible textbook that most others and well meaning, I think, although you and I may prefer later books as better again.